Throughout this month, we’ll be using the blog to have a conversation about Roger Rosenblatt’s Kayak Morning. Rosenblatt will receive the Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement in New York City on November 5, and he will be in Gambier on October 2-3 to give a keynote address at the Kenyon Review Literary Festival.
When I teach life writing—as I’m doing this semester, in my ENGL 211 course—I warn students against evaluating our readings in terms of whether or not they can “relate to” or “identify with” them. Why would we read (and value reading) only works that reflect ourselves and our experiences, as we currently understand them? Why wouldn’t we want to draw upon the ever-expanding body of autobiographies and memoirs to make contact with experiences of the world that complement and enlarge our own?
I was startled and not a little disturbed, then, by my gut response to my first reading of Roger Rosenblatt’s Kayak Morning. I wanted to connect with Rosenblatt’s memoir. I thought I had approached it with openness, with the kind of welcome that I hope my students bring to unfamiliar works. But when I finished it last weekend, I felt as though it and I had been holding each other at arm’s length. The frustrated part of me wanted simply to declare, “I couldn’t relate to this book.”
I refused to capitulate to that easy declaration, and not just because I’m always suspicious of easy declarations. I suspected that part of my difficulty with Kayak Morning lay in the fact that I did identify with part of it, though in a somewhat sidelong way. I had seen myself fairly early in Rosenblatt’s work. But I was the absent, fiercely missed daughter—who died at almost exactly the age I am now—rather than the achingly alive narrator grappling with that daughter’s death. I kept threatening to haunt my own reading experience, and that, too, made me suspicious—made me feel the danger of simply settling for a self-involved reading. After all, Roger Rosenblatt is not my father, and Amy Elizabeth Rosenblatt Solomon had a being in the world entirely, irreducibly distinct from my own. I wanted to connect to both of these people more fully than I had through Kayak Morning, if only to realize more richly their own, distinct humanity.
And so I turned to Making Toast: A Family Story (2010), Rosenblatt’s first memoir of his daughter’s death and the impact that it had on his family. I built a clearer sense of the Rosenblatts and the Solomons, at least in their textual manifestations. I met Amy’s children and husband; I met Rosenblatt’s wife Ginny; I commuted repeatedly from Bethesda, MD, to Quogue, NY, and back. I learned more about Rosenblatt’s emotional makeup when he is with other people, moving forward through his ongoing life even as he looks back over his daughter’s past one. “I am not inclined to talk about my feelings with anyone but Ginny,” he writes near the end of Making Toast, “and only rarely with her. Something about the momentum of our lives is good for us, keeps us from sinking” (122).
I saw him receive his kayak as a birthday present from Ginny. And I heard him tell his students of his daughter’s death, hoping to convey to them (and to connect with them through) the universality of grief and loss: “Mainly, I’d like them to realize that we’re all in the same boat” (111).
When I returned to Kayak Morning for my second read, I was better able to feel, with fuller force, what a solitary book it is. Its solitude is by no means depopulated. As Rosenblatt tells us early on, “On the creek I am the crowd” (6); both the creek and Rosenblatt teem with life—life observed, lives recollected. But even if we’re all in the same boat, we’re in endless iterations of that boat, and we’re paddling alone. “I leave the shore to move about on uncertain ground,” he writes. “I am engulfed in mystery. I am on my own. The people I love, though only half a mile from here, feel far removed, as though I will never reach them again” (118).
And yet we’re also not alone, not in our individual kayaks, not in our individual acts of writing and remembering, as Rosenblatt notes in musing over the connection between kayaking and writing: “You are alone and not alone. No one writes alone. Write, and you are in the company of all who have written before you. No one paddles alone” (17).
Early in Kayak Morning, Rosenblatt describes the counterintuitive move required to right a kayak in danger of capsizing: “[Y]ou have to lean into the paddle, which will put you off balance. When you are completely off balance, so much so that you are certain you will topple over—you bring the paddle down hard on the water’s surface, the way ducks bat their wings. You will feel your kayak right itself. Only by moving in the direction you least trust can you be saved” (9). In a sense, this entire memoir is a leaning into the paddle, leaning into grief, leaning away from the presence of others, leaning into irreducible loneliness, leaning into believing in the irrevocable absence of the beloved dead. It’s often epigrammatic, even idiosyncratic, in its explorations—and on my second reading, I was better able to feel what matters about the austerity and restraint Rosenblatt brings to representing his memories and his grief in these pages.
On my first read, I wanted to feel that I was right there in that small boat, spending a morning paddling on Penniman’s Creek and in a lifetime of memories; in some perverse way, it’s possible that I wanted that feeling precisely because I’ve had the luck not yet to suffer a catastrophic loss in my own life. On my second read I felt the deep value in not being able to believe I was immersing myself in Rosenblatt’s experience—since what I’d almost certainly have been doing, instead, is subsuming it in or appropriating it as my own. I came to appreciate the ways Kayak Morning refused me, kept me in my own boat, looking on as its narrator made his way toward a provisional resolution: “I am alive with memory. I can weep. And I can praise…. On and on we bear one another into the bruise-dark waters. The burden of the generations…. We are what we never were. Hardly alone” (139).
The single most poignant moment in this memoir, for me, comes immediately after this passage I’ve just quoted, as Rosenblatt addresses his daughter directly (not for the first time) in a paragraph of second-person narration. It’s too rich—in memorial presence and recollected loss, in connecting with and distancing from possible readers, in resolution and always-ongoing grief—for me to give it here, out of context. It is the moment when I could feel, most acutely, the ways Kayak Morning had invited me to float alongside its narrator’s grief, hardly alone, while also holding off or even rebuking my impulse to assume I might comprehend that specific grief.
You’ll know it when you get there.
Read the next post in this series here.